Perspective: The Russia ConnectionAs Feds Struggle, States Create Their Own Anti-election Propaganda Programs

As the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, individual states are ramping up education efforts to counter the threat posed by foreign disinformation campaigns to US elections. A lack of action at the federal level has prompted many states to craft their own programs designed to counter foreign efforts to undermine American democracy and educate the next generation of voters in schools.

As the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, individual states are ramping up education efforts to counter the threat posed by foreign disinformation campaigns to US elections.

A lack of action at the federal level has prompted many states to craft their own programs designed to counter foreign efforts to undermine American democracy and educate the next generation of voters in schools.

Kevin Collier writes for CNN that Declassified intelligence reports on Russian meddling, by design, refuse to analyze the effectiveness of American opinion. And though most of Russia’s known propaganda efforts in the 2016 election were unsophisticated — armies of trolls with often strongly partisan opinions on polarizing subjects — they were effective enough to be widely quoted in the media and cited by a number of political figures, including Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn, who went on to briefly serve as Trump’s national security adviser

The Department of Homeland Security found no major foreign hacking campaigns dedicated to derailing the 2018 midterm elections. But the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the agency dedicated to fighting disinformation tactics, alerted Facebook on the eve of that election of dozens of accounts and pages operated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the “troll farm” that was active on social media in 2016, which the company promptly deleted.